Words_about_words_An_introduction_to_Eng

Lexical Strata in English

England, “we can note that there is a small amount of geographical variation at least in spoken Standard English, such as the different tendencies in different parts of the country to employ contractions such as He’s not as opposed to he hasn’t. But the most salient sociolinguistic characteristic of Standard English is that it is a social dialect” (Trudgill 1999: 123).

SE is the dialect spoken as their native variety by about 12 to 15% of Britain’s population, this segment being concentrated at the top of the social scale. The further down this scale one gets, the more numerous nonstandard forms of language one comes across. From a historical point of view, SE was selected (though not through a conscious process of decision making by regulatory bodies such as academies, for instance) as the variety to become the standard one precisely because “it was the variety associated with the social group with the highest degree of power, wealth and prestige. Subsequent developments have reinforced its social character: the fact that it has been employed as the dialect of an education to which pupils, especially in earlier centuries, have had differential access depending on their social class background” (Trudgill 1999: 124).

Once agreement has been reached on the fact that it would be inappropriate to talk about a specific SE accent or about peculiar SE vocabulary, the most obvious features that make SE differ from other nonstandard English dialects lie at the level of grammar. Though they are not very numerous, the social significance of these features seems to be undeniable. From among them, Trudgill (1999: 126) quotes the following:

•“Standard English fails to distinguish between the forms of the auxiliary forms of the verb do and its main verb forms. This is true both of present tense forms, where many other dialects distinguish between auxiliary I do, he do and main verb I do, he does, and the past tense, where most other dialects distinguish between auxiliary did and main verb done, as in You done it, did you?;

•Standard English has an unusual and irregular present tense verb morphology in that only the third-person singular receives morphological marking: he goes versus I go. Many other dialects use either zero for all persons or -s for all persons;

•Standard English lacks multiple negation, so that no choice is available between I don’t want none, which is not possible, and I don’t want any. Most nonstandard dialects of English around the world permit multiple negation;

•Standard English has an irregular formation of reflexive pronouns with some forms based on the possessive pronouns e.g. myself, and others on the objective pronouns e.g. himself. Most nonstandard dialects have a regular system employing possessive forms throughout i.e. hisself, theirselves;

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•Standard English fails to distinguish between second person singular and second person plural pronouns, having you in both cases. Many nonstandard dialects maintain the older English distinction between thou and you, or have developed newer distinctions such as you versus youse;

•Standard English has irregular forms of the verb to be both in the present tense (am, is, are) and in the past (was, were). Many nonstandard dialects have the same form for all persons, such as I

be, you be, he be, we be, they be, and I were, you were, he were, we were, they were;

•In the case of many irregular verbs, Standard English redundantly distinguishes between preterite and perfect verb forms both by the use of the auxiliary have and by the use of distinct preterite and past participle forms: I have seen versus I saw. Many other dialects have

I have seen versus I seen;

•Standard English has only a two-way contrast in its demonstrative system, with this (near to the speaker) opposed to that (away from the speaker). Many other dialects have a three-way system involving a further distinction between, for example, that (near to the listener) and yon (away from both speaker and listener)”.

What is considered SE from a grammatical point of view should be

regarded without losing sight of the fact that language is continuously changing and that it might very well happen that what is labeled nonstandard at a certain moment should become the norm. The reverse phenomenon is also possible – what is today considered standard language might enter the category of non-standard forms in the future.

6.2.3.2. Slang

If SE is a variety of language associated mainly with the upper and well-read classes of society, slang is considered the attribute of lower social classes chiefly. It may be contrasted with “jargon (technical language of occupational or other groups) and with argot or cant (secret vocabulary of underworld groups), but the borderlines separating these categories from slang are greatly blurred, and some writers use the terms cant, argot, and jargon in a general way, to include all the foregoing meanings” (Varanakov online: 4). However, just like in the case of SE, this does not mean that slang is never used by speakers not belonging to the portions of society just mentioned.

Slang may be defined as a variety of language characterized by the use of very informal and generally short-lived non-standard words, phrases and meanings (“coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced or facietous figures of speech” (Varanakov online: 4), new meanings that have been attached to old words or narrow meanings of words that have become generalized). Thus, it is a language

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variety that exhibits distinctive features at the level of vocabulary, grammar not being particularly different from that of mainstream language.

Slang originates in various subcultures or occupational groups in a society (police, medical professionals, computer specialists, sports groups, religious denominations, drug addicts, criminals, etc.). Within these, slang words and phrases are initially suggested by an individual, usually, as a way of expressing “hostility, ridicule or contempt” (Varanakov online: 5) either towards the members, values, attitudes or behaviour of her / his own group or of a different group. However, only after these lexical elements are widely adopted by the group or subculture within which they were created do they have chances of becoming real slang (a one time usage does not guarantee their survival as part of the language variety under discussion). Following this stage, if the group or subculture has an extensive enough contact with the mainstream culture, these words and phrases may spread and become known to a greater number of language users. “For example, cat (a sport), cool (“aloof, stylish”), Mr. Charley (“a white man”), The Man (“the law”), and Uncle Tom (“a meek black”) all originated in the predominantly black Harlem district of New York City and have traveled far since their inception.

A slang expression may suddenly become widely used and as quickly dated (e.g. 23-skiddoo for “get lost”). It may become accepted as standard speech, either in its original slang meaning (bus, from omnibus) or with an altered, possibly tamed meaning (jazz, which originally had sexual connotations). Some expressions have persisted for centuries as slang (such as booze for alcoholic beverage). In the 20th century, mass media and rapid travel have speeded up both the circulation and the demise of slang terms, while television and novels have turned criminal cant into slang (five grand for $5000).

Changing social circumstances may stimulate the spread of slang. Drug-related words (such as pot and marijuana) were virtually a secret jargon in the 1940s; in the 1960s they were adopted by rebellious youth; and in the 1970s and ’80s they became widely known” (Varankov online: 7).

Besides expressing ridicule, hostility or contempt, as hinted at above, there seems to be other reasons that motivate the birth of slang. Possible such reasons, as Partridge (1933), quoted by Fox (online: 7) suggests, are: the exercising of ingenuity, wit and humour; the desire to be different, novel or picturesque (“either positively or – as in the wish to avoid insipidity – negatively”), “to be unmistakably arresting, even startling”, “to escape from clichés”, “to lend an air of solidity, concreteness, to the abstract, of earthiness to the idealistic, of immediacy and appositeness to the remote (in the cultured, the effort is usually premeditated, while in the uncultured, it is almost always unconscious when it is not rather subconscious)”; “to lesson the sting of, or, on the other hand, to give additional point to a refusal, a rejection, a recantation; to reduce, perhaps also to disperse the solemnity, the pomposity, the excessive

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seriousness of a conversation (or of a piece of writing); to soften the tragedy, to lighten or to ‘prettify’ the inevitability of death or madness, or to mask the ugliness or the pity of profound turpitude (e.g. treachery, ingratitude); and / or thus to enable the speaker or his auditor or both to endure, to ‘carry on’, to speak or write down to an inferior, or to amuse a superior public, or merely to be on a colloquial level with either one’s audience or one’s subject matter; to show that one belongs to a certain school, trade, or profession, artistic or intellectual set, or social class, in brief, to be ‘in the swim’ or to establish contact and, hence, to show or prove that someone is not ‘in the swim’; to be secret - not understood by those around one (children, students, lovers, members of political secret societies, and criminals in or out of prison, innocent persons in prison, are the chief exponents)”.

Slang is not restricted either temporally or geographically. All historical periods and all geographical areas have had their own slang. Chaucer used gab for “talk” and bones for “dice” as early as the 14th century, pansy became the slang word for “weak or effeminate boy” in the 15th century, while, during the Elizabethan period, words such as nun for “prostitute”, rake for “a morally loose man”, fishmonger for “a woman who keeps a brothel” and to die for “to have an orgasm” crossed the border from common language into the category of slang, together with Shakespeare’s costard (a big apple) for “head” and clay-brained / knotty pated for “slow of wit”. Examples of British slang include: air biscuit – “an expulsion of air from the anus, a fart”, carry out – “alcohol brought from a bar with the intention of taking it home or away”, legless – “very drunk”, pearl harbour

–“cold weather”, spare tire – “a roll of fat around one’s midriff”, while, among the slang words and phrases peculiar in America, there are: fix – “dose of drugs”, to go bananas – “to go crazy”, honcho – “boss”, megabucks

–“a lot of money”, mickey mouse – “nonsense and waste of time”. In Australia, crow eater – “a person from Southern Australia”, cut lunch – “sandwiches”, liquid laugh – “vomit”, to veg out – “to relax in front of the TV” circulate as slang and so do bompie – “a fat girl that is easy to get into bed”, to crash – “to go to sleep”, to graze – “to eat”, skinner – “gossip”, spook and diesel – “cane spirits and Coca-Cola”, in South Africa.

As suggested above, though most extensively used by the lower social classes, slang makes itself room in the speech of educated members of the high society as well. To illustrate this, Varanakov (online) quotes George Washington who used redcoat for “British soldier”, Churchill who chose booze for “liquor” and Lyndon Johnson who opted for cool it to mean “calm down, shut up”.

Professionals in various areas and representatives of particular groups of society use, each, their own sang. Thus, doctors, nurses and other medical staff refer to “accidentally leaving a surgical instrument inside a patient” as burying the hatchet, to a proctologist as a rear admiral, to an obstetrician as a baby catcher or to a surgeon as a slasher. They also call

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the rheumatism department in a hospital rheumaholiday, on the grounds that it is, usually, a less busy department, and refer to performing varicose vein surgery as digging for worms, while a patient who is unable to get out of bed is, for them, a beached whale. Students sprinkle their talk with slang elements, too. On the website of the University of Leicester (http://www.le.ac.uk), for example, the glossary of slang terms used by the students here includes: bee’s knees or mutt’s nuts for “greatest, best”, a brown nose for “someone who makes fake friends to advance socially or professionally”, death stick for “cigarette”, to talk to the hand as a sarcastic dismissal to show that the listener does not care what the speaker is trying to say. Thieves, on the other hand, have had their difficult to decipher slang ever since prisons first appeared. Thus, for those populating jails, a cadillac is an “inmate dorm bed or single bunk”, to do the Dutch refers to “committing suicide”, big jab, stainless steel ride and doctorate in applied chemistry are all used in connection with the lethal injection, to kill one’s number means “to serve one’s time or to get out on parole”, to cling rock – “to sell cocaine”, sweet kid – “an inmate who allies with an older, more experienced inmate, possibly for protection or knowledge”, etc.

As previously indicated and exemplified so far, slang is based on coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, abbreviations, new meanings that have been attached to old words or narrow meanings of words that have become generalized. Metaphor and comparison play an important role as figures of speech on which slang builds. The former combines with rhyme to give birth to a clear cut category of the variety under discussion – the rhyming slang, especially well represented in the case of Cockney, the variety of English spoken by the working class Londoners. Illustrative examples of Cockney rhyming slang, selected from online sources, include: apples and pears (“stairs”), Jack and Jill (“restaurant bill”), Oxford scholar (“dollar”), pig’s ear (“beer”), pleasure and pain (“rain”), street (“field of wheat”), trouble and strife (“wife”), etc.

According to Katamba (2005: 170), “the rhyming slang lexicon is quite fluid. There are some phrases like joy of my life and storm of my life, meaning ‘wife’, which are of long standing. But there are also many ephemeral rhymes, e.g. those that involve the name of a celebrity who is still in the limelight (e.g. Germain Greer ‘beer’, Al Pacino ‘capuccino’, etc.). Others fall somewhere in between: … dancing flees – “keys”, dog and bone

– “phone”, drum and fife – “knife”, etc.”

6.2.4. Written and oral varieties of English

The differences between the spoken and the written varieties of English are generally agreed upon. Although they have been a familiar subject in many linguistics books so far, the previously well drawn separation line between the two has become quite blurred recently, under the influence of the development and more and more extensive use of

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communication channels such as the email, mobile phones and online chat rooms. Thus, new varieties of English, specific to electronic communication, have evolved and deserve the same amount of attention as the language used in traditional oral and written settings.

Spontaneous speech, one form of oral communication, occurs when people talk naturally and informally, without having planned in advance what they are going to say. This is not to mean that spontaneous talk is just “small talk” for the sake of talking, that the interlocutors have no conscious aim in their talk whatsoever, but rather that “linguistically, they have not already worked out what form of the language they are going to use to express what they want to say. In their heads, they may well have quite clear intentions, but they will actually express these intentions spontaneously, if and when they get the chance to in the course of the conversation” (Davies 2005: 92).

Although informal conversation does not seem to be closely controlled, a set of rules is still applied by the speakers, even if unconsciously most of the times. These are connected to the use of formulas to open or close a dialogue, of greetings or pragmatic idioms (adjacency pairs of the kind I’m George. / Nice to meet you; I’m sorry! / No problem.; Have some more cake! / No, thank you, I’ve had enough, etc.), to giving feedback (by using, for example, discourse markers such as yes, I know, exactly, sure, etc.), asking and answering questions, making and responding to suggestions, signaling the intention to keep or to yield the floor (in the former case, by, for instance, pausing at a moment when the sentence is still incomplete and when, therefore, the interlocutor feels discouraged to take over; in the latter, by pausing when an idea has been completely expressed, directly asking for the interlocutor’s opinion or displaying suggestive body language – looking more steadily to the person to whom the speaker is willing to give the floor, nodding, etc).

Davies (2005: 92) lists some of the non-fluency features that are characteristic of spontaneous talk as follows:

• “abandoned / incomplete words such as thi-this and abandoned and / or reformulated sentence structure, such as I could always get

the tickets from … there’s a new box office down … you know, when you go through that new shopping archade…

• syntactic blends, where the structure of the sentence changes ‘in mid-stream’, e.g. About two hundred years ago we had ninety-five

percent of people in this country were employed in farming.

•mispronunciations and slips of the tongue, e.g. par cark for car park (syllable-onset consonants swopped); win a pin for with a pin (where an anticipated consonant is articulated early).

•fillers like er, erm.

•repetition (often combined with hesitation), such as

it’s…it’s…n…not that I want to be critical but…”

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Unlike spontaneous speech, rehearsed speech is, in some ways, prepared before it is uttered for an audience. This is, on the one hand, the case of speeches thought over and maybe even drafted before they are delivered to the listeners and, on the other, of drama, in whose case lines are learned by heart by the actors and then reproduced before the spectators. Therefore, though the aim of the speaker in these cases is to sound as spontaneous as possible, what s/he says does not come out in the same way as it does in the case of fully unprepared speech. Some nonfluency characteristics are preserved (syntactic blends, fillers, hesitation markers, etc.) though - intentionally in the case of theatre, possibly uncontrolled in the case of public speakers.

Traditional written texts are characterized by features that are the consequence of their being produced in a more controlled manner than oral discourse. The final version of a written text, one that might have been arrived at after several revisions, is a string of coherent sentences that reflect a logical sequencing of ideas. These sentences tend to be much longer and more elaborated than those in spoken discourse, with no (intentional) grammatical mistakes and with a higher level of vocabulary.

Features such as these, however, seem to no longer be detectable as such in recently evolved forms of electronic written texts like emails and text-messages. In such contexts, they rather mix with features of oral communication. The extent to which one category of features is better represented as compared to the other depends on the level of formality of the electronic texts. Features of orality prevail over those of written language in informal circumstances, while the situation is reversed in the case of electronic texts exchanged in more formal environments.

The mixture of oral and written language features in the case of online messages enabled Danet (2002: 4) to consider digital communication as, paradoxically, “both doubly attenuated and doubly enhanced”. It is, as she explains, less rich than both speech and writing. As compared to face-to-face spoken interaction, it does not benefit from the contribution of non-verbal and paralinguistic cues to the meaning carried by words themselves (although, as I shall indicate below, attempts are made at substituting the absence of these cues by symbols that stand for feelings, attitudes, reactions, etc). By comparison to traditional writing, on the other hand, its digital variant “is attenuated because the text is no longer a tangible physical object. Printing is optional…, and in synchronous modes of typed chat, communication on the fly is the thing, not an optional textual log of what happened” (Danet 2002: 4). However, electronic communication may be considered “enhanced speech”, since, unlike ordinary spoken language, “it leaves traces, and can therefore be reexamined as long as we are logged on, the program is open and the text is retained in the computer’s memory. We can reread what the other person or we have jus written” (Danet 2002: 5). It may also be looked at as “enhanced writing”, since “in its real-time interactive modes, the medium

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restores the presence of one’s interlocutor, long absent in the production of extensive texts. Moreover, it is far easier to establish immediate communication with the writer of an asynchronous message or text than in the past, making it more dialogic than in print culture” (Danet 2002: 5).

Davies (2005) points out some characteristics of emails and text messages that follow from their being produced at the intersection of speech and writing, and from their being delivered through the electronic medium.

Thus, one major area in which emails differ from pen and paper letters is “the extent of the variability” (Davies 2005: 102) of the former, that is the author of an email can revise it, add parts to it or remove portions of it, without this literally leaving marks on the text itself. An email may also lose its formatting while it is being sent so that what the text looks like on the author’s screen might not be similar to what it looks like when it reaches its addressee.

Emails differ from traditional letters from a stylistic point of view, too. Bullet points are used quite frequently in the electronic texts and usual punctuation and spelling are sometimes consciously not adhered to. Commas are lightly used, capitalization is often missing where it should have been present, but it is employed when it would not have been expected in a traditional piece of writing (when, for example, emphasis is drawn on a particular portion of the text), typing errors occur repeatedly, etc. Emoticons (combinations of keyboard characters meant to indicate certain emotions) or smileys (faces used for the same purpose) are employed in emails, to replace the actual spelling out of feelings. Among these, as Davies (2005: 103) lists them, there are:

Emoticons are used in text messages exchanged on mobile phones as well, here, more than in the case of emails, in order to ensure speed in communication. It is for the same reason why “textese” or “chatspeak” consisting, among others, of slang, alphanumerics of the kind B4 for “before”, M8 for “mate”, 2G2BT for “too good to be true”, GR8 for “great” and abbreviations such as CU for “see you”, RU for “are you”, BRB for “be right back”, UGTBK for “you got to be kidding” or OMG for “oh, my God” is also peculiar of this type of writing (however, if used in excess and between people who are not equally familiar with it, it may impede communication rather than facilitate it). “In fact, writers of text messages quickly become adept at reducing every word to its minimum comprehensible length,

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usually omitting vowels wherever possible, as in Wknd for Weekend, Msg for Message or deliberately using shorter misspellings, such as Wot for What. The spaces between words are also sometimes done away with in a text message, with word boundaries shown by upper case letters, as in

ThxForYrMsg (Thanks for your message)” (Davies 2005: 104).

Other types of omissions in text messages, meant to ensure their brevity imposed by the set number of characters that can be typed, include the absence of opening and, sometimes, closing formulas, the usual exclusion of the sender’s name, of the subject personal pronoun I, of copulative verbs and certain prepositions.

The above mentioned characteristics of text messages are as well peculiar of the conversations carried on in chat rooms. However, though not absent, they tend not to be that frequently encountered in another form of online writing, that specific of message boards. Unlike in the case of text messaging and the exchanges in chat rooms, which are synchronous forms of communication, “message boards are net forums to which people can post messages at a more leisurely pace, often over days or weeks” (Davies 2005: 104). The fact that communication is asynchronous in their case (points of view are recorded at a certain distance in time) allows the senders of the messages not to write them under the pressure of time and, therefore, to compose them (in quite numerous cases, though not all) with the amount of attention to vocabulary, grammar, spelling and punctuation usually paid in pen-and-paper letter writing. The following extract from an online exchange of opinions on the 2010 box office top movie Avatar (posted on the “Rotten Tomatoes” message board) may be considered illustrative for the way in which features of oral, informal communication, of previously discussed text messaging and of traditional, careful writing mix in a new form of text. Abbreviations such as cg for “computer generated”, lol for “laugh out loud”, reduced forms such as C’mon, for “Come on”, ellipsis in sentences such as … you expected more?, were like the opposite (containing the filler like and a subject-verb agreement mistake), omissions such as I came in the movie for “I came in the movie theatre”, informal forms of words such as yep for “yes”, typing errors and the use of lower case where the upper case should have been employed combine with elaborated sentences and structures such as In my opinion, it was incredibly over-

hyped which naturally caused critics to analyze it more pessimistically

than they normally would, a visually epic and narratively engaging film, emphatic word order as in It was not the violence at where it was flawed.

It was that James Cameron converted acting, talent and plot to a Visual Eyegasm. It is as if all things which make movies great … and elevated vocabulary of the kind flawed, laughable, detrimental effect, critical reception, etc:

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C. Fuchs. On March 11, 2010. 02:59

For all its powerful technologies, Avatar can’t get out from under its essential cardboardness.

Brittany W. On March 11, 2010. 06:14

Cardboardness? What movie theater were you sitting in? Try waking up to watch the movie before judging it.

Derrick. On March 24, 2010. 06:19

I’ll disagree with the comment above me. It was not the violence at where it

Steeping Razor. On May, 18, 2010. 01:24

I agree. I finally saw Avatar, and many parts were overly silly and laughable. It was best when the military was attacking Pandora, but overall it

Stephen G. On May 20, 2010.02:50

Hu, you expected more? I came in the movie expecting it to be ****y, but i was wrong. Were like the opposite.

Enoch, C. May 25, 2010. 13:20

lol some people in the theater cried when the marines killed that big*** tree in Pandora. i wanted to slap them.

The Creeper. May 29, 2010. 6:42

I fully agree.

Vicky M. June 9, 2010. 6:40

Dances with Wolves, that’s all I have to say.

Jason K. June 9, 2010. 11:08

yep dances with wolves, fern gully, Pocahontas. avatar doesn’t have an

Alyssa W. June 13, 2010. 11:35

C’mon, how can you not like this movie?

A55 Velcro. July 3, 2010. 7:42

I can easily not like this movie for many reasons.

Chris K. August 16, 2010. 3:56

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